Re: OT: Californian and Teen Speak

On Fri, 15 Apr 2005 23:15:36 -0400, # 1 <salut_vous_autre@...>
wrote:

>B. Garcia wrote:
>
>>Here's a link to an NPR interview with Penelope Eckert, professor of
>>Linguistics at Stanford who has been studying the speech of teenagers
>>around
>>the Bay Area of northern California. She gives better
>>explanations of what I'm talking about than I do :)
>>
>>http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1693373
>>
>>
>
>Just a question for my personal knowledge:
>
>How many dialects of English can y'all "percieve" as English speakers?
>
>Personnally I can only distinct 4 of them: North of the US, South of the
US,
>England, and Australia
>
>But there are probably more of them: NW and NE can probably be distincted
>like SW and SE and maybe Center and there are probably more than one in
>Australia and England and some others in all the english speaking
countries.
>
>What is it for y'all?
>
>- Max
Don't forget Southern and Eastern African Englishes, and certainly to my UK
ears the Celtic nations have their own accents and some of their own
words.  How distinct do you need to be to be a "dialect" rather than a
regional accent?  So you might well add Scots, Welsh and Irish.
I'd probably agree with you about grouping together NZ and Aussie English,
though.

Oh yes, don't forget the Caribbean!

Geoff